Dark Iron King II: Arcadia Falls (Unreal Universe Book 5)

by Lee Bond

  Continuing on down the darkened corridors as cautiously as ever, enhanced hearing and augmented sight straining to maximum, ever vigilant for any signs of being attacked or followed by any kind of fungoidal war machine, one of Huey’s subminds surreptitiously announced that it’d ‘accidentally’ forgotten to exit the AI data threads it’d mined. Just as accidentally, it’d come across a most startling document, issued directly by Trinity Itself to Commander Politoyov.

  “Riiiiiiiiiiiiight.” Huey ignored the multitudinous cries of apology and self-abasement and read the memo.

  The ‘tone’ of the dispatch was less than pleasant, and the matter of that missive was … distressing.

  Huey leaned against a wall, peeking his head around the corner before he got too comfortable; when he was yet again satisfied –and absentmindedly arguing with a new batch of subminds who wanted to boot the whole ship up and just have at ‘er ‘for the war effort- the level 11 AI perused the document more thoroughly.

  ”Enforcers are requesting black hole ships from Specters? What the fuck kind of nonsense is that?” The demands made no sense. Trinity’s weirdly passive-aggressive insistence they be given access without cause or complaint, doubly so.

  The only possibility that went towards explaining this sudden back-handed requisitioning of warships was that It’s Enforcers were no longer capable of translating themselves across the Universe as freely as they once had.

  Which made no sense. Not to him, and certainly not to Politoyov!

  Since his brains had gone on and ignored his specific requests to be as invisible as possible, Huey slid into a restless AI mind and took a quick noodle around. Making the reasonable assumption that Enforcers employed a variant of standardized Quantum Tunneling, Huey hunted around for issues concerning the universally-used quick transport system. If there were any problems with any Quantum Tunnels, that news would’ve been spread throughout Trinityspace within seconds.

  Nothing.

  If everything was hunky-dory, then why were Enforcers demanding black hole ships? The whole direction this thing had taken made no sense.

  Huey wrinkled his nose. “That’s fucked up. That’s really, really fucked up.”

  There were no ‘layers’ to the particular form of wormhole employed in Trinityspace. In essence, the Unreal Universe was best envisioned as a plane, quite similar to the extra-dimensionality. Every Q-Tunnel ‘simply’ dug a hole from one place to another, with the supercharged artificial intelligences running the start and finish Tunnels communicating with one another to prevent collapse, or worse, intersection with another Tunnel in the same relative space. It wasn’t flawless, it wasn’t perfect, but Quantum Tunnel tech had been in use for nearly thirty thousand years.

  This meant something … interesting.

  Huey didn’t like interesting when it came to Trinity. This close to the end, it wasn’t only safe but wise to assume that everything It did, even if it made no fucking sense at all, had some far-reaching purpose that might have no actual connection to the specific weirdness. Enforcers jacking black hole ships without proper paperwork could wind up having more to do with …

  Huey drew a blank. He had no idea what It’s machinations might mean, and that was super-aggravating. It wasn’t like there was a blank spot in his mind when it came to Trinity Itself, it was just that the damn thing was in control of almost the entire Universe. It was already capable of thinking in terms that turned Huey’s head.

  “I fucking hate mysteries when I’m already dealing with weird shit.” Huey griped. A submind caustically shouted in his ear that he was getting too old for this shit and was looking forward to retirement. He laughed appreciatively at the joke and then told that mind to get bent.

  Compounding matters, Specters were fighting Enforcers to protect their craft. And in some harrowing cases, coming very close –worryingly so- to winning.

  Huey took a left, mind spinning over that. Standard Specter crews, most often these days augmented by one or two Heavies now that the war effort had put the majority of Cordon-expansion tactics on hold, were holding their own against Trinity’s big dogs, the players it sent in when entire solar systems were fucking around. And –Huey’s finally regrown eyebrows nearly shot right off his face as he came across a truly vehement transmission from Jade Song- in one case, winning so spectacularly that Yellow Dog had sworn a vendetta against Special Services, a blood-pact that –so the video claimed- would last a million years.

  If he wasn’t encased in folded gravity, Huey’d pull at his hair. The apoplectic Yellow Dog Elder made no mention of which specific crew was out there pissing off the largest organized crime operation History had ever seen, but after looking combing through footage of the devastation and following up on a few leads here and there concerning Jade Song, it only took a galactic genius to see that it was the appropriately named ‘Armageddon Troop Too’ –commanded by Garth’s old pilot, Edio Tekmara- that was responsible for the chaos.

  “Well,” Huey said cheerily, trying to put a positive spin on things, “at least we know where Naoko got herself off to.”

  Every single submind went off in search of better things to do to avoid further embarrassment by their host mind; Huey had long suspected –thanks to traveling with Chad- that it was all too likely that the ‘Priests had done or had attempted to do the same thing to Naoko as they’d done to the cybernetic assassin. Ever keen on thrusting themselves into the Big Fight and unfortunately in possession of weird technologies enabling them to become a Universal nuisance combined with the type of crisis assailing the Yellow Dog system, it became evident to Huey quickly on that the weird-beards had succeeded.

  A moment of genuine concern passed through Huey, and for a multitude of reasons.

  First, he was sorry for his the boss; still not entirely free of depredations of the Specter looming deep in his soul, Naoko Kamagana had given the reeling Kin’kithal warrior something to focus on, something that was –to him- bright and pure and good in the world. Simply by knowing her, Garth had swung back from that yawning chasm quite a few times on Hospitalis. Things would’ve gone very differently had Naoko not been there, always smiling, always laughing.

  Secondly, using Chad as the basic template for the kinds of awful hijinks the CyberPriests got themselves up to when they were tinkering with ordinary people, it was difficult to imagine that someone like Naoko would come out very much worse for wear. What manner of powers and abilities had those bizarre bastards thrust upon sweet and kind Naoko Kamagana as they pursued their own twisted endgame?

  Had they finally abandoned their absurdly messianic visions of Savior 1.0 sweeping in to lead them to violent glory, or had they upgraded the stellar-class genius into Savior 2.0? Unlike Chad, who’d been born hard and only gotten harder with age, Naoko almost certainly couldn’t have withstood those kinds of external pressures; her predatory stance in Jade Song was one hundred percent vindication of this fact.

  Huey desperately wished there was some way to learn Naoko’s mental state. Was she as broken as Chad? Was she in command of her faculties? The documents he read through showed an ever-escalating skill in dealing with the Yellow Dogs and their powerful armadas, not to mention –if you knew how to read between the lines- ever more subtle use of the weird powers given to her by the ‘Priests.

  At the end of the day, it probably didn’t matter one way or the other if she was cracked all the way through or acting intentionally, just as it didn’t matter why she was in a single solar system honking off a bunch of cranky old gangsters when she should –if she followed the CyberPriest mandate- be out there whanging away on entire galaxies.

  If she was in Jade Song engaging in some kind of shaking out process for her new powers, then from what he was reading through, sooner rather than later she’d be up to speed and then…

  … and then she’d either unfurl her plans to assist the CyberPriests in their attempt at Universal destruction or she’d strike out on her own.

  That was how it was, thes
e days.

  At least Politoyov had shown incredible wisdom in sending Armageddon Troop Too off to deal with Naoko, because there was one facet to the woman’s predatory style that not even the commander’s voluminous files had considered: long term exposure to Garth N’Chalez.

  That, more than anything else about the situation, had Huey’s short and curlies shorter and curlier. There was precisely zero way to anticipate what the N’Chalez Effect had done to the poor woman.

  Had the N’Chalez deep inside –the one capable of planning a thirty thousand yearlong plan for destruction- looked at his girlfriend as an asset or an enemy? A tool or a lever?

  More to the point… which would be of more benefit to the man’s vision of Reality 2.0?

  Huey thanked their collective stars that it was Armageddon Troop Too out there. If there was any group out there loyal to Garth and also capable of handling a CyberPriestly-enhanced, extra-dimensionality altered super-hacker, it’d be them; their own time with Garth had yielded positive results in the whole ‘let’s just be sane and normal and continue doing the right thing, only now we have this other side to us which we aren’t going to tell anyone about.’

  “I just really hope they manage to find a non-violent solution.” Huey fretted.

  There was no way of knowing how Garth felt about Naoko after so long. He’d been out and about accumulating data on the Goth King and Emperor-for-Life that whole time. Unable to spare a single moment for her thanks to the Herculean task before him, had he written her off as the price of doing business or did he still hold out against hope that one day they’d be reunited?

  Knowing how heavily reliant the ex-Specter had become on the Latelian woman, Huey feared Naoko had been placed on the mother of all pedestals. Losing her, or even the innocent image that he projected in his own mind to keep him calm and still, might be the sort of thing to see a resurgence of Specter in the Stars.

  Huey sighed. So much death, so much misery. Knowing that there was more on the way did nothing to alleviate his mood, but the AI swung his mind back on track once more.

  Engineering grew ever closer. Two corridors away, in point of fact, and in all that not one single spark of life had flitted across the varied and many scanners and subroutines scouring the immediate area for the merest hint of anything ‘not him’. Scenarios rose and fell like mayflies. Security detecting the viral invasion, raining down fire to counter, dying in the process. The virus burned too hot, too quickly, destroying all save the hardiest flesh. The virus failed altogether, and Tendreel, knowing she was destined to be caught and killed for her attempt, killing the crew in some way.

  About the only thing the Myco wouldn’t do was flee; in her mind, the task was of such monumental importance that the virus would’ve found it impossible to pull away from the search for even a second.

  Throwing caution to the wind at long last –and much to the joy of his paranoid and over-protective subminds- Huey burned through the remaining layers of the ship’s AI minds as he walked the final leg of the journey to Engineering, a blowtorch searing through paper houses.

  To annoy those same subminds, Huey hunted for Politoyov first, clenching a fist angrily when all every file came back partially deleted. One second, the man was there, the next, gone. There was a five minute stretch of time all across the AI datasphere where information had been cleanly and professionally incised out of the communal mindspace.

  That …wasn’t… wasn’t good.

  There were only a few entities in Trinityspace capable –theoretically- of doing such a professional job on so many powerful AI minds without being caught.

  There was him, naturally. He could fill these AI minds with stories of unicorns and stargoats and the rousing adventures of Sherlock Holmes and have them believe it so thoroughly that anyone investigating would be forced to admit either the existence of unicorns or just shuffle the whole thing off into a corner.

  There were Enforcers, but they rarely messed around with being subtle. If they wanted AI data gone, they just blew the AI up and wandered off for a quick cigarette before bamfing across the Universe to their next job. But since they were all busy hijacking SpecSer ships all across the Universe, Huey considered them off the map until he saw one face to face.

  Finally, there were Adjutants. They could do that kind of job standing on their head, but again, they were –to a one- so good at what they did, they wouldn’t leave evidence of their tampering behind. Not to mention they’d leave Trinity sigils all over the fucking place to illustrate the fact that when people did shit they shouldn’t ought to, they’d get their asses disappeared.

  “Well now I wish I did have Scooby and the Gang.” Huey sucked at a tooth. Hell, he’d even put up with the garrulous and aggravating Scrappy Doo in order to solve the Mystery of the Missing Offworlder.

  Several dozen subminds wondered if Tendreel and hers would bother messing around with the recordings to disguise the man’s death or transformation.

  Their musings were met with a ridiculous amount of information denying any such thing: the commander’s personal of every interaction with Tendreel Salingh showed a clear and overpowering loyalty bordering on obsession.

  If The Old Man wasn’t a part of the zombie mushroom garden and he hadn’t fucked off on his own, Tendreel herself must’ve stuffed him into a lifeboat before commencing Operation Zombify Everyone.

  A submind hesitantly pointed out that the escape pod bays were still full and the ejection logs hadn’t been messed with.

  “Bah.” Huey caught himself grinding his teeth and aching for a Charbo Burger, to which he told Barnes’ body to fucking hold its horses. He was here to deal with Tendreel. Once the mushroom prophetess and her fungal horde of psychically-enhanced viral drones were dealt with, he could properly involve himself in the hunt for the man.

  No matter where he was. Because as badly as Huey wanted to get his ass back to Latelyspace as quickly as possible, Commander Aleksander Politoyov was perhaps one of the most important men in the entire Universe: throughout the History of Man, there’d been many men and women –and Offworlders- possessing exemplary tactical minds, but none of them held a candle to The Old Man.

  If there was anyone better suited to marshal the nascent Universal Army destined to stand against the Heshii than him, Huey hadn’t met him. Or her. Or it; no matter how loudly Fenris claimed he and his were going to be the ones standing on the front lines going toe to toe with the Heshii and their Harmony soldiers, Huey had every intention of making sure that didn’t happen.

  “Goddamnit. This is utter bullshit.” He’d had more than his fair share of ‘adventuring’ with Gwyleh and Chad. The last fucking thing he wanted to do was hump around the Universe looking for the one guy who trained other dudes to be the hardest people to find. If Politoyov didn’t want to be found…

  Huey shook his head. Impossible mission indeed.

  The doors to Engineering hove into view. Huey had to admit to himself and to his vastly amused and assholish subminds that he was more than pleased to have avoided coming across any Myco-infested undead. It was all too easy to recall Garth’s shuddering horror whenever he spoke of the Cloud Zombies of Goreene, and while the infection vectors were entirely different, Huey couldn’t help but think of his problem in much the same way.

  A few ‘minds shuffled footage they’d dug out of the video archives and waited patiently.

  “You guys.” Huey rolled his eyes. He honestly didn’t know why he gave them as much ‘freedom’ as he did. They were continually doing things he wanted to do but didn’t because, well, because. He was trying to be as human as possible before the End because when the End came, there’d be no more time left for humanity.

  He watched the footage. It was of the crew. As feared, all of them became infected by Tendreel’s Myco virus, literally within hours. Some felt the effects of her spores flooding through vents within minutes, some took most of those hours, but all … all fell to her desperate need to fulfill her mission. And just as fr
ighteningly, that infection took on weird, disturbing forms as the intelligent virus replicated like wildfire through the organic bodies; some, thankfully, did die the moment a threshold was reached, but others suddenly sported weird fronds, or thick tendrils, or odd protuberances, pushing, molding, folding and distorting standard humanoid bodies into frightful caricatures of their former selves. In each instance, that final … burst of growth, where the Mycogene intellect overrode all individuality, was the last true glimmer of freedom for each man, woman and Offworlder aboard the ship.

  And then came humble Tendreel, given leave to depart Homeworld because she –like all those with passage to Trinityspace- had been the least of her species. Diminutive, uninteresting to look at once you comprehended the strange nature of her existence, Tendreel roamed through the halls of the ship, singing strange, atonal songs, summoning her … her … brood to her and they came, oh they came, from wherever they were, they shuffled and shambled, and when they fell into the pack, they started singing as well.

  “That … that is fucking terrifying.” Huey suddenly felt the pressure of his gravny-gen suit pressing against his skin and was instantly glad he’d not even considered turning the damn thing off. For all he knew, the atmosphere was flooded with Myco-virus.

  Tendreel and her brood sang and shuffled all the way to the common ‘room’, which was, in fact, as big as a hangar.

  The subminds ended the replay there, sensing the depth of their overmind’s revulsion, for which Huey was grateful; witnessing Tendreel and her minions shuffle through the hallways singing and dancing had been like the opening sequence for a horrific zombie mushroom musical.

  The ‘minds fast forwarded, dropping Huey’s prescience into the humongous common area. The AI watched on in silent horror as the mushroom prophetess and her drones began situating themselves throughout, forming unspeaking rows of organic computers. The feeds blipped out, one after the other.